Storms in the Rockies

There is nothing half-hearted about weather in the West. Extremes are the order of the day.

Last week, I headed east on Colorado's Route 160 after my early morning exploration of Mesa Verde National Park, thankful that I was finally leaving the oven that was the “Four Corners,” where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet. The mountains on the horizion promised cooler weather at last.

Durango was the first stop – a well-preserved, chic, and busy town in southern Colorado. For the first time in days, temperatures were tolerable. I enjoyed walking around the main street and driving through some of the historic residential neighborhoods, then returned to the road to continue on to Pagosa Springs, as the route rose into the Southern Rockies. I crossed the Continental Divide via the spectacular Wolf Creek Pass in the San Juan National Forest, and turned southeast towards Alamosa.

Ominous clouds started to gather over the peaks as I approached La Veta Pass, which takes the road over the eastern Rocky Mountain mountains into Walsenberg and down to I-25. At first they were a pleasant diversion. The land was so flat that it was easy to see where the rain was already falling. The storms looked pretty serious but, at least so far, it looked like my route was going to successfully skirt the worst of it.

 
However, as I started the climb into the pass, the first drops appeared on the windshield. Then the rain became steady, but no one slowed down very much. When the hills disappeared into a gray torrent, cars started to slow, although the 18-wheelers continued to roar past my car. I finally pulled over to the side and turned on my hazards when my wipers, going at full tilt, made absolutely no impact on the amount of water on the windshield – I couldn't see a thing.

I waited. And waited. No let-up. I watched rivulets turn into small rivers along the dirt pull-out. I worried about being caught in a flash flood, something news reports always warn about in this region, but the water seemed to be successfully disappearing somewhere behind my car. When I could at least see one hill in front of me, I set out again but pulled over around the next curve with several other out- of-state cars unused to the force of this kind of storm.

This happened several times through the pass – the world would disappear into a grey shroud, the biggest drops of unrelenting rain I have ever seen would pelt down upon my car. I was happy they weren't hailstones. Huge washes of water crossed the road and carved out a streambed at the edges of the dirt pull-out where several of us had stopped. Finally, after about an hour of starts and stops, my fellow travelers and I felt confident that we could continue on and left the safety of the side of the road.

My friend Joey, a childhood friend and Colorado resident who joined me for the final leg of my P2P tour, insisted that this was normal for the Rockies. And, sure enough, the mornings dawned with sparkling blue skies; wispy clouds appeared by midday; and by afternoon towering thunderheads dumped torrents of rain somewhere or other, driving people off the roads and into shelter.

Impressive. Scary. I'm not sure I could stand the constant excitement of life here in the Front Range.

Heatwave

Keys View Promontory, Joshua Tree National Park, CA

It has been some two weeks since I left the cool of the northern California coastal redwoods. And, although I complained about how tired I was of the residues of volcanic activity, at least my tour there kept me on the tops of mountains, where snow still occasionally lined the roadway at depths of 10 ft. or more.

As I descended down through California's Central Valley, the temperature jumped to amazing heights. 104 degrees in Redding, at the northern end of the Valley, was the start of it. Leaving the glare of I-5, I detoured through the Napa Valley on my way to Martinez in the Bay area, where a family gathering was planned. This provided some relief from the heat, but not the traffic. Napa is now a major destination for city dwellers who don't really want to leave the city behind on their vacations. It reminded me of the posh Hamptons on the South Fork of Long Island.

After spending two wonderful days getting reacquainted with the West Coast wing of my family, Betsy, Dan and I left for Yosemite National Park, King's Canyon, and Sequoia National Parks, in the Sierra Nevada mountains. (These will get their own little stories when I get my thoughts together.)

When we left Sequoia via the Three Rivers exit on the south, we had no idea what lay in store for us. By this time, the Central Valley near Fresno had been experiencing record heat and very poor air quality – a fact noted by the park rangers in Sequoia.

To reach our next destination, Joshua Tree National Park, our route skirted the south end of the Sierra Nevada range and into the Mohave Desert, on the east side of the Sierras, where temperatures climbed to over 110 degrees. Nothing appeared to be moving on the hundreds of square miles of brush, red dirt, and rocks, except for the traffic.

Red Rock Canyon State Park, near the Mojave Desert, California

We turned east at Victorville, silly us, and continued deeper into the desert. 29 Palms is an artsy outpost at the north entrance to Joshua Tree, where we spent the night vowing to get an early start in the morning.

Dawn comes to Twenty Palms, California

It was already in the 80s by the morning when we started out, then it quickly rose to the 90s. We saw a variety of reptiles, desert rodents, and birds – along with Joshua Trees, of course. We ended with a brief respite at a Keys View promentory, where we peered down into the Coachella valley near Palm Springs, along which runs the San Andreas fault. The valley was murky with days of unbroken heat and pollution.

View of San Bernadino Mountains near Palm Springs, California, from Keys Point.

Los Angeles was no different – and millions of people were leaving town for parts north. Las Vegas promised no relief – it was in the high nineties there as well. I continued north to Zion and Grand Canyon National Park, where I hoped the higher elevation would save me. I was wrong. The winner of the high temperatures for the week was in Kanab, Utah, which reportedly reached 114 degrees the day I booked a room there.

Intense heat, coupled with hundreds of miles of wide open wilderness, is nervewracking for this gentle Easterner. First, heat and I are not on the best of terms. I think it is my Irish blood, yearning for fisherman's knit sweaters and a cool mist. This part of the trip would have been better attempted in the winter, in retrospect.

On the road to Kanab, UT. Temperature 113 deg. F.

Second, although my new Jetta wagon has been a stellar perfomer, I worry about having a flat tire, engine trouble, or some other event that will strand me in the heat, along the side of the road. This fear is compounded by the fact that I can go for a hundred miles without a cell phone signal. I brought along a CB radio for emergencies, but that requires a functioning car battery – something that I am not convinced will work when I need it.

Finally, it makes it hard for me to enjoy anything in this beautiful landscape, if it means that I have to leave my air-conditioned car. Sightseeing? Forget it. Shopping at some out of the way trading post? Ridiculous. All I really want to do is get as close as possible to the boundaries of the next amazing park I am going to visit, check in to an air-conditioned hotel with WiFi and a cell phone signal by 2 in the afternoon, and hide out in the cool until 5 the next morning, when I can streak into the park before those pesky [other] tourists get up.

How exhausting!

Lassen Volcanic: Close Encounters of the Bearish Kind

Up until this morning, the total sum of my experiences with the fauna of the Northwest United States on this trip consisted of a marmot, squirrel, and a chipmunk; a herd of elk; a deer; some bison, and a roly-poly mama black bear and two cubs.

However, all of these were sort of discounted, in my cynical Easterner's mind. For instance, the marmot and chipmunk were rather cute and no threat. The squirrel? Well, we have a lot of them in New Jersey. The herd of elk was way off in a meadow – hardly something in which one would take more than a passing interest. The bison in Yellowstone – big, impressively scruffy – but seemed all too often to be playing to the cameras. They rolled around in the grass at the side of the road, huffing and snorting, and causing a traffic jam of some twenty cars at a time, all the while posing for the audience. The black mama bear with her cubs also feigned shyness on the bank above the road, as forty to fifty cameras whirred and clicked to immortalize every move. Park rangers were even out there directing traffic.

No, these were not true wilderness encounters, to my mind. But they would do, certainly. After all, who really WANTS to run into any of those larger species in the middle of nowhere? Certainly not me. I didn't even feel comfortable straying very far from the safety of my car when I jumped out to take a photo of a scenic vista .... from the side of the road.

Today, however, in Lassen Volcanic National Park, I had my first real encounter with Ursa Major. Actually, it was an Ursa Horribilis (Ursa = bear; Horribilis = grizzly). They say that the last Grizzly in California was shot and killed in 1922. But you can't convince me of that after today.

Lassen is a strange place. It is the only national park in the United States that is the site of what is still considered an “active” volcano. Its last series of eruptions occurred in 1914 - 1917. The landscape in the Devastated Zone, which suffered the greatest damage from mudflows, lava, and debris, is otherworldly, even now – almost 100 years later. There are bare areas of granular pumice. Areas completely covered with jagged rocks that look like rip-rap provided by some quarry for road construction. Grassy areas where boulders as big as a small cabin landed after exploding out of the crater.

In other places, however, the mountain boasts verdant meadows and tall stands of ponderosa pines, firs, and other evergreen trees. It's spring there, even though it's the middle of July. Tender green shoots of wetlands plants are still less than a foot high, growing in and around soggy drainage streams from the remaining snow drifts. The first wildflowers are starting to appear along the margins of the roads. And in the midst of all this beauty, there are few people to intrude on one's reveries, as Lassen is one of the least-visited of all the national parks.

I was enjoying just such a moment of peace and solitude, puttering along at about 20 miles an hour through a particularly beautiful stretch, when a huge golden-brown hulk bounded from the right bank of the road about 30 feet in front of my car. 1000 pounds of pure bear-flesh was galloping faster than I would have thought possible towards the other side of the road, obviously focused on something more interesting than me. He paused just long enough to throw a startled glance in my direction, as if to say, “Don't even think about coming near me with that thing [my car].” Needless to say, I didn't.

Now THAT is what I call wildlife! Just close enough ... and far away enough ... for me.

Redwoods

Feeling parched from the last few days of volcanic activity -- well, witnessing the after effects, anyway -- at Mt. Rainier, St. Helen's, and Crater Lake, I felt I need to take the day off. I turned my car towards the coast for a day of moisture, green plants, shady groves, and a different kind of inspiration: Redwood Country.

I soothed my conscience by noting that exploring Redwoods National and State Parks was indeed, a worthy enterprise. It did, you see, qualify as a member of the target group of my investigations. But it was off the official track of the 1920 Park-to-Park dedication tour route.

I reminded myself that the original tour members were slackers in some cases. They never saw Crater Lake (the Rim Road was not completed until later), nor did they ever see Lassen Volcanic National Park (there were no roads into that park in 1920). I felt I could be forgiven a slight diversion from the tour especially since it was my birthday.

And a wonderful birthday it was, too. In my race around the parks of the Northwest, I had been flying. My tight schedule forced me to cover huge distances and digest enormous of information in a short period of time. Once I picked up the kids in San Francisco, I can take it easier. At least that's what I tell myself.

In Frommer's guide to the Western National Parks, I found the Historic Requa Inn, a bed and breakfast housed in a 1914 inn overlooking the Klamath River, between the northern and southern sections of the Redwoods parks. The inn lies in an area of delicate balance between fog and sun. As I look out from the sitting room windows, the top of the hill across the river is swathed in a cottony layer of mist. But the tree line along the river is clear, as is the road and the inn itself. Sun seems to be breaking through in one spot, marked by a brilliant patch of fog, just over the next hill to the east.

Mouth of the Klamath River, near Requa, CA.

Yesterday's explorations took me south of the towns of Requa/Klamath to the peninsula that marks the beginning of the southern section of the parks. I drove first the Klamath Beach Road, which curls around the tip of the peninsula at the south side of the river's outlet to the sea. There, the spectacular views of the coast were unsullied, for the most part, by other cars filled with tourists like myself. Wildflowers populated the road side in great abundance Foxglove, wild roses, tiger lilies and many I couldn't name. Maybe I will get lucky and find then in the wildflower guides for the western region I purchased yesterday.

There were a couple of interesting sites along the road, including the old entrance to a memorial bridge, since replaced, which was guarded by enormous statues of bears one at either side. Then, there was the radar station from World War II, disguised as a farmstead. From a distance, no doubt, it would have looked authentic. Viewing it up close, however, it became a concrete-block bunker, with a reinforced roof made to look like wood shingles.

Leaving those sites behind, I turned south to follow the Newton B. Drury Scenic Drive through magnificent stands of enormous redwoods, some 15 feet or more in diameter. Golden light filtered through the tops of the trees and splashed the ferns at the base of the trees. In the shadows, plants and flowers took on a blue cast.

I stopped at Big Tree, a pullout where there were several paths that seemed about my speed. Still suffering the effects of a broken foot suffered last winter, I still didn't feel sure-footed. And also ... there were the bears. I did not want to get any closer to bears than the ones that guarded the defunct memorial bridge over the Klamath.

Big Tree offered not only Big Tree itself (a specimen over 1000 years old), but also a perfect stroll through the Cathedral of Trees” and several other well-worn footpaths. Fortunately there were other people around. The bears would probably prefer those other people, I thought, if they weren't already frightened away by our shear numbers or the whoops of small children discovering hidey-holes in the trunks of these massive trees.

As I entered the grove, it was magical. In spite of the whoops, the people, the well-worn paths, it is impossible to become unmoved by the majestic redwoods. You feel you are in the presence of great spirits. Wisdom, endurance, constancy, strength - the trees embody these qualities and more.

Like most of the places I have been, I try to study up before I write about them. With the redwoods, the primary impact is not intellectual, but emotional. Yes, I will eventually study more about them, I will explore the history of how they were saved from destruction from being clear-cut by the logging interests, which only occurred only within the last 50 years. But, first and foremost, the redwood country is a magical place where intellect is secondary. It is a place where wonder dominates.

On the Road

Map of the route for the National Park-to-Park Highway
Dedication Tour (1924)

When I started this enterprise, I thought my careful planning had taken every contingency into account and/or were things that could be conquered on the road. So much for best laid plans....

My house sitters, Russ and Jeanmarie are happily in residence, enjoying the opportunity to live near New York City for a month (they live in North Carolina). I had packed clothes and shoes for all types of weather and terrain, since the trip would include the highest mountains of the Northwest to the hottest desert in the Southwest. I bought a new Jetta diesel 6 months ago, which handles like a dream and gets around 43 mpg. I had checked that my car registration and insurance were up-to-date, and that there was money in the bank. I had joined AAA and several main highway-type motel chains. I had even included a portable file with hanging folders, where I could organize my background materials en route. And I had included three cameras – two point-and-shoot and one DSLR – three 16 Gig SD cards, and a new ruby-red Iomega portable hard drive to back up my photos. I was set.

The plan was to drive during the day and write thoughtful comments in this blog every evening. Partly so that my family and friends not worry if they knew where I was on a daily basis, and partly because I thought it best to capture one's impressions along the way immediately.

But I wasn't prepared for two really big factors: 1) driving is exhausting; and 2) your favorite techie gizmos don't always work.

The first couple of days I reveled in the liberation of the road. I was proud of myself, being able to find suitable accommodations each night – some rather interesting, like my room overlooking the Mississippi River in Le Claire, Iowa; others not so much, like the hotel near I-80 in the middle of unrelentingly flat Nebraska.

Then, as I crossed time zones, my body clock seemed to get totally out of whack. I would check in to the hotel I had booked the previous evening at around 5 p.m. (500 miles/day was my limit), and all I could think of was getting something reasonably healthy for dinner and going to sleep. I was in bed by 7 p.m. some nights. Of course that meant that I awoke at 5 a.m. and was on the road again by 7 a.m., without having had the energy to write anything down at all. I was on a fairly tight schedule, since I was to meet my son Dan and his wife Betsy in San Francisco in 2 weeks, by then having already visited the five northern parks (Yellowstone, Glacier, Mt. Rainier, Crater, and Lassen Volcanic) – a fairly tall order.

However, I had devised a way to take copious notes of what I saw along the way, to help me remember when it came to writing about it: I have two cameras at the ready in the front seat. My small, shockproof, waterproof, everything-proof point-&-shoot camera was good for taking the unstudied, drive-by notes from the car. The Canon DSLR was reserved for the “important photos,” where you actually stop the car to take something incredibly interesting. It takes a lot to get me out of the car when the drive-by notes are so easy, but the scenery in the West, in particular, is breathtaking. I have pulled to the side of the road so many times to capture a vast valley, an interesting feature, or massive mountain range I can't possibly count them. I would bracket each set of photos with a shot of their location on the road map. And, at night, I could, I thought, organize the photos so that I could go back and retrieve just the ones I needed.

A technical glitch threw this plan off track. I forgot my favorite card reader and, for some reason, the USB cable was not transferring the photos to my computer. I was desperate – how would I back up my photos? What if something went wrong with the cameras, or they were stolen? How could I see the photos or edit them? How could I show friends how beautiful this area was?

In Cheyenne, Wyoming, I bought a new card reader at some big-box store, but that didn't work either. The inability to transfer my photos to my computer or do anything with them was not just a frustration. For this visual person, it was a total disconnect from the travels of the day. The exhaustion of driving combined with the technical problems with my imaging were the first major challenges of this journey.

Now I realize, especially when I read about the life-threatening hardships endured by the early explorers of the western territories, that my problems were miniscule in comparison. But they were my challenges to overcome, nonetheless. Gradually, as my body adjusted to the time changes and the rhythm of the road, I became less tired. In the parks, I took my time in the early morning – the best light of the day for photos and fewer people. By noon, I was out of the park, either to wait for more exploration of the park the following morning or to take time resting or walking around an interesting place outside the park.

As for the technological problems, my filmmaker/camera-expert son Casey came to the rescue, helping me understand what was preventing the file transfer. A new card reader solved the problem and, magically, I was in business again!

Today is July 4^th – the nation celebrates. For my holiday, I will start my journey to Mt. Rainier. I hope to be more attentive to this series in future days, although I feel that living the experience is much more important than writing about it en route. I am sure to catch up, though, after I have had the time to digest my thoughts, my research, and my images. Our national parks are, indeed, some of the most spectacular places in our country.

Logo for the Tour (1920)

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A Crustacean in Iowa

Detail of rose window, Louis Sullivan's "Jewel Box" Bank (1914).

Iowa was surprising in its lushness and its undulating hills. I had always pictured it as flat, very flat, with nothing but fields of corn as far as the eye could see. The Iowa that passed by my car windows along I-80, however, was very different. It was much like Ohio, with its rich farmland, varied crops, and rolling hills. (And of course barns. There were a couple of new varieties, like a double-silo structure that looked like it was encased in stretched jersey. But perhaps more about that later.)

As I trundled through the mid-part of the state, a single sign caught my attention. It had a simple white background with black lettering that said something like “Sullivan's Jewel-Box Bank – Exit 182.” No town was listed. Or any other guidance, for that matter. Being an admirer of Louis Sullivan's architecture, I jumped at the possibility that it was one of Sullivan's famous Midwest banks, which I had only seen in my architecture books.

I reached Exit 182 several miles later and veered towards the off-ramp. The signs pointed to towns in opposite directions, but only the name “Grinnell” sounded familiar. It was just 3 miles north. What could it hurt – it was a nice Sunday morning. It might be fun to see a typical small town in Iowa on this day of rest, regardless.

A few miles later, the main road had a sign that pointed right towards the business district, although nothing more about any famous bank. I followed it, hoping that my instincts were right. Sure enough, there, on a corner at the edge of the district, was Sullivan's Merchants National Bank, completed in 1914.

Merchants National Bank (1914, Arch. Louis Sullivan), Grinnell, Iowa

It was perfectly preserved. Every detail was intact. Even the winged lions at the entrance looked as if they had been recently gilded. Not only that, but the building was in active use by the Chamber of Commerce. It was an amazing sight. Here, in the midst of Iowa farm country, was a simple box of a building, perfectly proportioned, with a stunning rose window surrounded by a geometric ornament of intense, energetic encrustation on the facade -- a highly controlled explosion of organic forms.

Although he had enjoyed great success in the 1890s, Sullivan had suffered a decline in commissions in the early years of the 20th Century. His small Midwestern bank commissions became a prime focus of his practice, and they were the beneficiaries of some of his best efforts.

I have really only seen three buildings by Louis Sullivan, as much as I admire his work. The first was the Bayard Building (also known as the Bayard-Condict Building) in New York City – perhaps one of his lesser known works but his only design built there. Then there were the Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago and the Guaranty (now Prudential) Building in Buffalo, which he designed with Dankmar Adler. But for some reason, the bank buildings had always intrigued me.

So here it was, the “jewel-box bank” in Grinnell, Iowa. However, the rest of the town did not disappoint as far as historic buildings were concerned. Its historic town center was the showplace for a number of its finest buildings, many marked by landmark plaques. My little side trip to Grinnell was indeed well-rewarded.

For more information:

Pitts, Carolyn. Merchants' National Bank, Nomination form. National Register of Historic Places (1975):  https://npgallery.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NRHP/Text/06001112.pdf

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Barns!

The prelude to my exploration of the Western National Parks is a quick run across country. Although originally anticipated as a leisurely exploration of Kentucky – a state I had never visited – my schedule for the first part of the tour had been compressed by the need to reach a meeting point where my son Dan and his wife Betsy will join me. As a result, I decided to go directly to Denver via Route 80, the Interstate that runs across the middle of the county from New York to San Francisco. This would allow an extra three days to spend exploring the parks.

Although I had anticipated a grueling, generally uninteresting but occasionally scenic trip, I got totally distracted by the barns. Much of the territory through which I passed was rural, beginning with a short cut across the western corner of the Southern Tier of New York State. Real working farm-country rural, not the rural with which I am most familiar in New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the Union. And the thing that impressed me most of all were the regional curiosities of the older barns.

I first noticed certain anomalies among the barns in western NYS. Yes, many were the archetypical gambrel-roofed frame barns with round silos, painted the familiar “barn red.” But then there was one with a rectangular appendages mounted on the side of the silo, from ground to the roof. Then another had a small cabin mounted on top of the silo, with a gambrel roof to match the main barn, and joined to it by a covered walkway. That got my attention. Questions jumped to mind about what possible reason would have cause some taciturn farmer to build this folly. A minor amusement, trying to figure that out. Something to pass the time.

Dropping down into Eastern Ohio from NYS was a less interesting ride, and by the time I reached Cleveland area, where I stayed with Betsy's parents (thanks for the kind hospitality!), the scenery offered more typical highway fare. The next day, however, the road passed through the farmland of western Ohio, where substantial farms stretched for hundreds of acres along the highway. Tidy buildings, fields planted with crops in neat rows. And suddenly I noticed that, unlike the red barns of upstate NY or the green barns of New England – most of these barns seemed to be painted white. In fact, most of the buildings on the farm were white. Gleaming, pristine white. Open doors were black rectangles against those blindingly stark walls. Now why, I asked myself, would anyone in their right mind paint a barn white? Doesn't it get dirty? Don't you lose site of the farm when it snows? Do you have to see it more clearly from a distance in the summer? Is white paint less expensive than red or green?

And then there were the roofs. Gradually, the typical gambrel roof gave way to pitched roofs. White barns with pitched roofs. Fascinating. Not all barns, of course, had pitched roofs. And not all were white, but such types were plentiful, nonetheless.

As I skirted the populous south end of Lake Michigan – Gary, Indiana, to Joliet, Illinois – farms gave way to industrial parks, shopping centers, and tract houses. But soon I was back in farm country again. Along both sides of the highway from north central Illinois through the western part of the state were even larger-scaled farms set among rolling fields. We were beginning to penetrate more deeply into corn territory. Fields of waist-high corn were clearly recovering from some heavy rains that had left small ponds in the midst of some of the fields. And here I noticed another regional quirk in barn construction.

Barns in northwestern Illinois have a small frame monitor on the ridge of the barn, which looks like a miniature of the barn it sits on. If the barn has a pitched roof, then the monitor has a pitched roof. If the main roof is a gambrel, then the roof of the monitor is a gambrel. I even saw a Gothic barn from the early 20^th Century with a Gothic-roofed monitor. Sometimes the ridge of the monitor is perpendicular to the main building, sometimes in the same direction.

Usually, the barn on which such a monitor sits has two large doors, one at each gable end. Often they are open, so you can see clearly through the building. The monitor also has openings or vents – often small windows, one at each side. In one instance, there was a conveyor into one of the windows from an apparatus on the ground. Sometimes there is another barn nearby that is more tightly closed.

Are the barns with monitors for grain storage? That might be the reason for the additional ventilation. Is it for livestock? If so, how does heat stay in the building in winter? Was this form a vernacular version of what is now the ubiquitous round metal vents along the ridge lines of barns? Unfortunately, these questions probably will not be answered while en route. Maybe later. The best I can do at this point is take some photos as I drive past, in an effort to keep the questions alive.